News

Polish President Bronisław Komorowski decorated Oświęcim area residents who aided inmates of the German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz during the war. Seventeen of the thirty-two honorees attended the ceremony held at Belweder Palace in Warsaw on February 1 in connection with the sixty-sixth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

A delegation of almost 200 personalities and government officials from forty countries has visited the grounds of the former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz. The guests included former Senegalese President Abdulaye Wade, UN Deputy Secretary General Asha-Rose Migiro, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and special delegates and ambassadors from Egypt, the United States, France, Iraq, Morocco, and Turkey.

We are pleased to announce the opening of the First International Summer Academy organized by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, as part of educational programs organized at the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

January 27, 2011 marks the passage of 66 years since the liberation of the German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz. During the anniversary observances Professor Władysław Bartoszewski, former prisoner and initiator of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, addressed a special Appeal to the entire world for help in maintaining the authentic original remains of the former camp.

"The fight against time and the destruction of the historical space of the original camp is today the greatest challenge and our shared responsibility—to the victims and to the Survivors, but also to future generations, our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren," we read in the 2010 Annual Report of the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum. The sixty-eight color pages of this Polish-English publication include information about the most important events of 2010.

The International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust has published the sixth volume in the series "Voices of Memory. " The gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz are above all a symbol of the Shoah, but they also have a symbolic importance for the Roma, Poles, Russians and those of other nations, whose members had suffered and died in this, as well as at other death camps.